Archive for February, 2010

Freedom Works President Matt Kibbe talks the Tea Party, the power of the people and why he’s so optimistic about the future. We also talk about how technology has empowered the people and why that’s a good thing. People mentioned in this show include Dick Armey, Matt Lewis, Ryan Hecker, the Dallas Tea Party, Ludwig Von Mises, Thomas Sowell, Mike Lee of Utah, and many more. Check out FreedomWorks.org!

First, it’s important to examine how effective the FDA is in protecting the people when it comes to regulating drugs. Not very. Deaths from prescription drugs are “soaring“. Check out this recall list. That means that these drugs were approved as safe.

Second, an FDA approval gives a false sense of safety. Any substance designed to manipulate physiological functions is inherently dangerous. An FDA approval does not change that.

Now, all sorts of claims are made about supplements, but those are already regulated. People go through trends and often spend money on “worthless” supplements. Some nutritional supplements really help a person’s health. Some supplements offer only the placebo effect.

If a dude buys a supplement to enhance his “performance” and “size”, he’s stupid, but most of the time, that’s not fatal. Viagra, on the other hand, can be.

I would suggest that regulating this industry further is just an expansion of the nanny state and another way to infantilize the consumer. More than that, it’s a push by the medical industry because they’d like to put their competition out of business. They’d like to be the only ones to make nutritional recommendations and claims even though they have far less training than chiropractors and nutritionists. This is an economic argument and a desire for market share and nothing more.

So no. I don’t want the government pushing their nose into nutritional supplements. Mind their own damn business and cut the debt. I don’t want one stupid bureaucrat telling Americans one more thing about how they should live their lives.

Also, I think the FDA is pretty much bought and paid for by drug companies. Too much to get into now..but there are many experimental drugs that could help people. My opinion is to let people try them. It’s called choice.

Too often, people die while waiting for a drug to be approved when a drug has been used for years in another country safely. The FDA process also makes bring a drug to market so expensive that it creates a monopoly for huge pharmaceutical companies.

Free up the market. Tell people they’re on their own to research it. Let freedom ring when it comes to drugs and supplements. We should be opening this market, not giving the government more control.

In addition, as the New York Times reported, the main reason that President Obama had to — finally — release a White House plan is that the Democrats in the House and Senate could not come to an agreement, and the president had promised that he would post a Democratic proposal 72 hours before the summit. As a result of this new, third proposal, we now have even less Democratic unity than we had before Obama stepped in. When the summit takes place, this could lead to the awkward spectacle of Obama arguing for his plan, Reid and his Democratic colleagues arguing for the Senate bill, and Pelosi’s people arguing for the House bill.

So the Democrats are less cohesive than before. The summit appears, then, to be a power play.

The President will get up in front of Republicans and say that they’re obstructionist. The President will make bold statements that force grin-and-bear-it Democrats to go along to get along.

Will it work? Well, President Obama has been notoriously unsuccessful bullying the likes of the Olympic committee, for example, or allies into some form of a solution that he wants…aka “what’s good for me.”

But this theater is horrible..not for Republicans, but for Democrats. I only have to wonder if Obama wants the House to fall to Republicans. It certainly would make his political life easier.

By pushing and pushing on health care, something the American people are clearly sick of, he’s making life harder for Democrats, ultimately. Republicans have little to do with anything at this point.

Today’s health policy “summit” comes at a moment when, as happens with metronomic regularity, Washington is reverberating with lamentations about government being “broken.” Such talk occurs only when the left’s agenda is stalled. Do you remember mournful editorials and somber seminars about “dysfunctional” government when liberals defeated George W. Bush’s Social Security reforms?

The summit’s predictable failure will be a pretext for trying to ram health legislation through the Senate by misusing “reconciliation,” which prevents filibusters. If the Senate parliamentarian rules, as he should, that most of the legislation is ineligible for enactment under reconciliation, the vice president, as Senate president, can overrule the parliamentarian. This has not happened since 1975, but liberals say desperate times require desperate measures.

This is horrible for Democrats. Americans are looking around and see being out of work as the most important issue before them. Health care seems like a nice luxury, at this point.

But President Obama has to do this, I think, for himself. He has to demonstrate to Union bosses he’s beholden to, that he’s tried everything. He wants to “run against congress”, really. Obama seeks to position himself as the reasonable one and everyone else is being obstructionist and stupid.

Except the American people don’t buy it; or haven’t. Will they buy it now? Doubt it. The Obama schtick is overplayed. And the American people are sick of the liberal agenda.

They know what the President really wants and they know that Dems are patient about getting what they want:

So consumer confidence shocked everyone again yesterday. It’s a shock a minute in the media these days. Anyway, so in the NBC article about miserable Americans, NBC gives this pearl of insight:

Some economists pointed to one more possible source of angst: Congress.

“We suspect the absolute gridlock in Washington also depressed consumers,” said Bernard Baumohl, chief economist at the Economic Outlook Group in Princeton, N.J..

“Rather than seek some common ground on health care and financial reforms, both political parties demonstrated legislative incompetence and ideological rigidity. The constant bickering and lack of progress in the nation’s capital doesn’t engender much optimism among households.”

That voters are unhappy with Congress is well documented. The latest monthly Gallup poll showed just 18 percent of Americans approved of how Congress was doing its job, down from 24 percent in January and the lowest reading in the 13 months since President Barack Obama took office.

Since the $787 billion stimulus bill enacted a year ago, Congress has struggled to pass any of the major legislation Obama had put on his priority list, including health care and regulatory reform.

What utter b.s. My feeling is that the American people relaxed during the government-stopping snow storms. It’s not the gridlock that’s making people nervous.

The President of the United States Barack Hussein Obama causes the uncertainty.

He won’t let health care reform die, so it still occupies everyone’s mind. He won’t turn down the volume on his business-hating rhetoric. He won’t say a word to encourage the private sector. He’s ideological. He’s combative.

He is making people nervous.

Well, he’s making everyone nervous, aka UN-confident, and the media refuses to see the obvious.

Sure, the Congress is flopping around but Democrats are in charge of everything. The country feels like its being led by a children. It is.

NBC just demonstrates their obvious bias once again by not noting Obama’s words and actions. While everyone hates Congress, that’s almost a constant in American political sentiment. The President, though, is the communicator. And he’s an able one. What The One communicates, though, is very upsetting.

Unsettled people, nervous people, scared people are not confident people. There’s a reason consumer confidence is plummeting “unexpectedly”…look to the leader.

Can we agree that there is at least 1 thing that is 100% right and 100% wrong for the armed forces of a Representative Republic; the armed forces should never adopt in whole or in an obviously derivative manner any symbol of a domestic political party, organization, or movement?

Can we at least find common ground there?

Sigh. Always angling, these people. Jammie Wearing Fool has pictures of the old and new Missile Defense logos. Go take a look.

Then, come back and look at this:

Put it all together and you have the new Missile Defense Agency logo:

What a strange logo. Morph Obama’s logo with the Islam crescent, shake it in a can….

It’s far from clear that Democrats have the votes to pass anything close to this bill, even through reconciliation. Pro-life Democrats in the House may not go along with the Senate bill, which has more liberal language on abortion.

But even if they eventually go along, Speaker Pelosi could still be short of the votes she needs, thanks to attrition. To pass the Senate bill, she will probably need to flip a significant number of “no” voters into the “yes” column. Since most of the “no” voters come from relatively conservative districts, this is tantamount to asking them to commit political suicide.

I would submit that President Obama and the House and Senate leaders have been asking their members to commit political suicide from the beginning; for the cause. This is not a new development.

Yet here we are in late February watching the Democrats dance this insulting health care jig. Why? Because this is everything. They don’t care about losing their jobs. Passing this structure would be for the greater good.

This drum is one I keep on beating because I don’t think people on our side can fully comprehend the degree to which health care in the hands of the government matters to leftists.

Health care is the conduit with which to control every citizen’s life. It is core to a socialist’s world-view. It means survival for the unions.

This battle ain’t over ’til it’s over. And the Congress leaders on the left and President Obama know November will be a bloodbath anyway. They want something to show for it. Don’t underestimate their determination.

Abortion provider Dr. Kermit Grosnell has “dozens” of frozen babies–late term abortion deaths–stored on site of his Philly abortion clinic:

They found the dozens of unborn children killed in abortions who were frozen for decades. CBS 3 indicates they are now determining whether or not they may have been victims of illegal late-term abortions.

CBS 3 also reported that records from 1995 show Gosnell was publicly reprimanded by the State Licensing Board which found he ”employed a physician’s assistant that was not certified … saw at least one patient and treated him.”

So far, as a result of the abortion death, Gosnell’s medical license has been temporarily suspended, but he has not yet been charged with anything illegal. His abortion center is temporarily closed while the investigation proceeds.

Troy Newman, the president of the pro-life group Operation Rescue, told LifeNews.com that the suspension order described “deplorable and unsanitary” conditions at the clinic, indicating that “there was blood on the floor, and parts of aborted fetuses were displayed in jars.”

The order declared Gosnell to be “an immediate and clear danger to the public health and safety.”

Newman says the notion that legalizing abortion made it safer for women is fiction.

“This is not the exception to the rule in our nation’s abortion clinics. It is standard operating procedure,” he said. “This clinic is no better than a back alley abortion mill, and in fact may be worse.”

“Collecting the remains of dead babies over a 30 year time frame is reminiscent of the actions of deranged serial killers who keep body parts as trophies. It doesn’t get much sicker than that,” he added.

Don’t you wonder about abortion providers–especially those who “specialize” in late term abortions? What kind of depravity and psychological distance from the act must one engage to do such a thing?

There is a visceral repulsion to something so violent as killing a baby who could survive outside the womb, but it’s legal because the baby’s head is still in the mom’s body.

And there is something wrong with the mind of a doctor willing to engage in such a procedure. This Philly doctor is just more overt about the pleasure he gets from his kills. He belongs in prison.